A lot of people has asked me how can they remove from their boxes a program they
compiled and installed from source. Some times -very few- the program's author adds
an uninstall rule to their Makefile, but that's not usually the case.
This is my primary reason to write CheckInstall. After you ./configure;
make your program, CheckInstall will run make install
(or whatever you tell it to run) and keep track of every file modified by this
installation, using the excelent installwatch utility written by Pancrazio
'Ezio' de Mauro (p@demauro.net).

When make install is done, CheckInstall will create a Slackware, RPM or
Debian compatible package and install it with Slackware's installpkg, "rpm -i" or
Debian's "dpkg -i" as appropriate, so you can view it's contents with pkgtool
("rpm -ql" for RPM users or "dpkg -l" for Debian) or remove it with removepkg
("rpm -e"|"dpkg -r"). Aditionally, this script will leave you a copy of the installed
package in the source directory so you can install it wherever you want, which is my
second motivation: I don't have to compile the same software again and again every
time I need to install it on another box :-).

NOTE TO SLACKWARE 8.0 USERS:

Slackware 8.0 ships with a statically linked "ln", so any symlinks your installation
process creates won't be detected and won't be included in your package. The way to
fix this is to substitute your static "ln" for a dynamically linked one, like
this one from a Slackware 7.1 installation.